This workshop starts from a few basic principles: that process and product are equally important; that feminism and filmmaking are both critical spaces of intervention for changing culture; and that radical new moving image languages and forms are essential to the creation of feminist media making strategies. Ultimately, this class is an invitation to consider new conditions of possibility for making the culture you want to live in.

Over the course of three days, participants will explore possible definitions, methods, approaches, models for production, distribution and exhibition, interventions, histories and potential futures of feminist filmmaking. We will think expansively and structurally about how feminist makers can create collaborative support structures, small-scale everyday practices, and DIY exhibition space to make room for new kinds of work.

Designed by filmmaker Irene Lusztig and curator Mathilde Walker-Billaud, this workshop will deliver both practical advice and creative inspiration to filmmakers, artists, and storytellers of all kinds who are interested in including women’s issues and practices as part of their creative process. Through screenings, readings, conversation, a field trip to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and through encounters with media makers, curators, scholars, and distribution professionals, we will examine artistic and filmic explorations informed by feminism to consider complex questions around gender, power, activism, authorship, alternative histories, intimacy and empathy.

Filmmaker Irene Lusztig will lead the seminar as the main instructor.

There will be a public event, Mothering Every Day,  on 9/9 in conjunction with this workshop. All are welcome to come!

10:00a

Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.

10:30a

Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique

11:45a

Discussion

12:30p

Share / Discussion / Exercise

1:00p

Lunch (on your own)

2:00p

Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique

3:15p

Discussion

4:00p

Workshop Exercise + Critique

5:00p

Wrap Up

Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker, visual artist, archival researcher, and amateur seamstress. Her film and video work mines old images and technologies for new meanings in order to reframe, recuperate, and reanimate forgotten and neglected histories.  Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of her work is centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001), the feature-length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011), and her newest performative documentary feature Yours in Sisterhood(2018).

Born in England to Romanian parents, Irene grew up in Boston and has lived in France, Italy, Romania, China, and Russia. Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and RIDM Montréal, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She is the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal. She teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz where she is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media; she lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Kelly Gallagher is an experimental animator, filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Antioch College in Ohio. Her theoretical work investigates the radical and feminist possibilities of experimental animation. Her animations, experimental films and documentaries have screened internationally at venues including: Ann Arbor Film Festival, London ICA Artists’ Biennial, LA Film Forum, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Traverse City Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives. She is the recipient of the Ivan Kaljević Award from Alternative Film/Video Festival Belgrade, the Helen Hill Award from Indie Grits, the Audience Award from Brazil’s Fronteira Film Festival, and the Jury’s Choice Award from Black Maria Film Festival.

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is the chair of the Film Department at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth.  She is the author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1995); Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (Minnesota, 2005); Learning from YouTube (MIT Press, 2011:https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/learning-youtube); co-edited with Alisa Lebow, The Blackwell Companion on Contemporary Documentary (2015) and with Yvonne Welbon, Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of African-American Lesbian Filmmaking (Duke University Press, 2016). Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy as well as the feature films The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about feminist Internet culture including YouTube (aljean.wordpress.com) and feminist pedagogy and community (feministonlinespaces.com and ev-ent-anglement.com). With Anne Balsamo, she was co-facilitator of the network, FemTechNet, which debuted its feminist rethinking of a MOOC, a Distributed Online Open Course “Dialogues in Feminist Technology” in Fall 2013: femtechnet.org.

A Haitian-American filmmaker and educator, in 2014 Stefani Saintonge won the ESSENCE Black Women in Hollywood Discovery Award for her short film, Seventh Grade. Her documentary, La Tierra de los Adioses, won Best Latin American Short Documentary at the Festival Internacional de Cine en el Desierto. Her work, which focuses on women, youth and immigration, has screened at festivals and institutions internationally including Hammer Museum, Brooklyn Museum, BAMCinemaFest, Austin Film Festival and New Orleans Film Festival among others.  She is a member of the New Negress Film Society, a collective of radical black women filmmakers whose priority is to create community and spaces for support, exhibition and consciousness-raising. She is a recipient of the Jerome Foundation Film and Video Grant, BRIO Arts Award and is currently an artist in residence for Haiti Cultural Exchange.

Astria Suparak has curated exhibitions, screenings, live music events and performances for art spaces, festivals, and publications internationally, including The Liverpool Biennial, PS1, Eyebeam, Museo Rufino Tamayo, and The Kitchen, as well as for non-art spaces such as elementary schools, sports bars, and rock clubs.

Suparak was the director and curator of the Pratt Institute Film Series and Syracuse University’s Warehouse Gallery. At Carnegie Mellon’s Miller Gallery she curated Alien She, a traveling exhibition on the lasting impact of the global punk feminist movement Riot Grrrl; Keep It Slick: Infiltrating Capitalism with The Yes Men, the first survey of the internationally renowned culture-jamming group; and Whatever It Takes: Steelers Fan Collections, Rituals, and Obsessions, which explored sports fanaticism as a significant form of cultural production; among other exhibitions. She co-edited Sports, the latest issue of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, which is currently launching with a series of exhibitions, discussions, readings, and other events at locations including the Wexner Center for the Arts, San Francisco Cinematheque, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Gene Siskel Film Center.

Nina Yuen (b. 1981, Hawaii) received her BA from Harvard University, her MFA from Bard College, and completed a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Exhibitions include An Imaginary Relationship with Ourselves, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Oregon; Performance, Manifestacao Internacional, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; De-narrations, PanAmerican Art Projects, Miami, Florida; The Sky Within My House, Contemporary Art Patios, Cordoba, Spain, Lucid Dreaming, Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands, Children’s Biennial, Kaap, Utrecht, Netherlands, Junk, Moscow International Biennial for Young Art, Moscow, Russia, Never Done This Before, Delicatessen Zeeburg, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Contact 2016: Foreign and Familiar, Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI.

Drawing from sources including her own memories and experiences, literature, poetry, science, and art history, Nina Yuen merges the personal and the universal in her lush, evocative videos. Incorporating herself into her films as protagonist and narrator, she builds dreamlike, loosely constructed scenes out of hypnotic image series that seem to unspool into snippets of music and the rhythm of her voice, as she recites poetry, reads passages from a wide assortment of texts, and recounts her own and other people’s memories. Nature figures prominently in her work. Branches and trees stand in for human beings, dry leaves become two elks locking horns, and a copse of trees becomes an inchoate, existential menace. Though such weighty philosophical themes as death, time, and beauty run throughout her films, Yuen’s subtle humor keeps things light, surprising, and wonderfully strange.

Anya Rous is a Brooklyn-based producer and the Head of Partnerships at Multitude Films, a production company that produces award-winning documentaries by underrepresented directors and prioritizes stories by and about people of color, LGBTQ folks, and women.  Anya co-produced THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED (Tribeca 2018), co-executive produced CALL HER GANDA (Tribeca 2018) and co-produced the Sundance and Guggenheim funded documentary NAILA AND THE UPRISING (IDFA 2017). She is currently producing AFTERMATH a follow-up to THE BRANDON TEENA STORY (Berlinale 1988) by Emmy-nominated directors Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir. Anya brings a combined 10 years of experience in funding strategy, partnership development, and impact campaigns for stories that further movements for racial, economic, and gender justice. She formerly served as the Director of Strategic Relationships at Just Vision and as a grantmaker at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Anya is also the fundraising board chair at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and is a member of Resource Generation. She previously served on the North Star Fund’s Community Funding Committee..

The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is an exhibition and education environment dedicated to feminist art—its past, present, and future. Among the most ambitious, influential, and enduring artistic movements to emerge in the late twentieth century, feminist art has played a leading role in the art world over the last forty years. Dramatically expanding the definition of art to be more inclusive in all areas, from subject matter to media, feminist art reintroduced the articulation of socially relevant issues after an era of aesthetic “formalism,” while pioneering the use of performance and audiovisual media within a fine art idiom.

The Center’s mission is to raise awareness of feminism’s cultural contributions, to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art, and to maintain a dynamic and welcoming learning environment.

The Center’s 8,300-square-foot space encompasses a gallery devoted to The Dinner Party (1974–79) by Judy Chicago, a biographical gallery to present exhibitions highlighting the women represented in The Dinner Party, a gallery space for a regular exhibition schedule of feminist art, a computerized study area, and additional space for the presentation of related public and educational programs.